Canada's democracy losing to China's 'oligarchy:' Ignatieff/Manning

The University of B.C.’s Paul Evans has written a valuable piece exploring Canada’s potentially deadly competition with the People’s Republic of China.

The professor of Asian international affairs at the Institute of Asian Research and the Liu Institute for Global Issues looks at the various ways that Canada could most effectively engage with China, the world’s fastest-rising economic and military giant and Canada’s largest source of new immigrants.

In his piece in The Literary Review of Canada, Evans offers a useful perspective on the approaches taken by both Preston Manning, former Alliance Party leader, and former Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff. The two aren’t that far apart in the way they see the relationship with China as full of pitfalls.

Evans notes Ignatieff’s concerns that China is an “oligarchy” that has no ideology other than “enrichment.” And he expresses some sympathy with Ignatieff’s belief that it’s best to engage China as an “opponent,” not an “enemy.”

Behind the negativity is a growing fear that a rising China poses a profound challenge to values and institutions that Canadians hold dear. Preston Manning framed the sale as part of a “deadly serious political competition with China” that “pits the well-developed Chinese Communist ideology of state-controlled capitalism and state-directed ‘democracy’ against the older Western ideology of market-driven capitalism and citizen-directed democracy. This competition is especially keen in developing countries where the West and China compete for resources.” The West, he added, “appears to be losing the competition.” A few months earlier, Michael Ignatieff spoke in Riga about the “decisive encounter” of liberal democracies with post-communist oligarchies in Russia and China “that have no ideology other than enrichment and are recalcitrant to global order,” that are “predatory on their own societies” and that are “attempting to demonstrate a novel proposition: that economic freedoms can be severed from political and civil freedom, and that freedom is divisible.” As “Mao continues to glower down over Tiananmen Square,” commerce and capitalism, contracts and economic relationships have not dented China’s political system. Ignatieff called for a “defiant stance toward the new tyrannies in China and Russia,” and approaching them as “the chief strategic threat to the moral and political commitments of liberal democracies.” But rather than seeing conflict as inevitable and eternal, he advocated responding with both curiosity and tolerance, avoiding the fixed categories of “us” and “them,” “[learning] from beliefs we cannot share,” and treating China as an opponent, not an enemy while practising politics, not war or religion.

{NOTE: Readers may find it helpful to know that http://www.dictionary.com defines oligarchy as: “A form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.” In other words, oligarchies are not confined to China.}

Evans, who is currently a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong, says: “Even as the Party transforms itself and the domain of personal freedoms expands, fundamental transformation of the political system through electoral mechanisms has stalled. China may no longer be totalitarian, but it remains authoritarian and is unlikely soon to evolve in the direction of western-style multi-party democracy.”

Despites his wariness, Evans concludes that it’s worth it for Canada to try to find creative ways to engage China. “It will take wisdom, knowledge and political courage to update the strategic partnership and recast the Canada-China narrative. It will mean eschewing absolutes and being cosmopolitan in opening values and institutions, including our own, to constant interrogation and the search for common ground in a messy multi-centric world order shifting before our very eyes.”